The Big Picture (Senate Side)

We've been looking a lot recently at the congressional generic ballot measure. One of the reasons that measure is so important is that there are simply so many House races that it's impossible to look at them individually. And all but a very few of them are either not polled, or polled so infrequently, that it's very hard to get any clear sense of trends. But that's not the case on the Senate side of the ledger where most of the competitive races are being polled quite closely. After the jump, trend charts and the latest poll averages of all the key Senate races that are going to determine who's in the majority in January.

It is from the Democratic perspective, to put it mildly, not a pretty picture. The two races that particularly stand out to me, however, are Wisconsin and Ohio, where Republican candidates staged dramatic mid-summer breakouts. See Ohio below and you'll see that Rob Portman went from basically tied with Fisher to opening up a very sizable lead. Pretty much out of the blue in June. The trend graph shows a similar story in Wisconsin, where Russ Feingold had a small lead into mid-July when John came out of nowhere to open up a sizable lead.